Kerry Attacks Bush Over Loss of Explosives

LAS VEGAS, Oct. 26 - Senator John Kerry lambasted President Bush on Tuesday over the disappearance in Iraq of a huge cache of powerful explosives, saying the president's response to "devastating facts" about the explosives called into question his competence as commander in chief.

Mr. Kerry said the White House had first tried to conceal those facts until after Election Day, then minimized them when they emerged and finally denied them.

"And what did the president have to say about the missing explosives? Not a word. Complete silence," Mr. Kerry bellowed in Green Bay, Wis., all but daring Mr. Bush to answer him.

"Mr. President, what else are you being silent about?" he asked. "What else are you keeping from the American people? How much more will the American people have to pay?"

The disappearance of the explosives has roiled the presidential campaign since the report on Monday, by The New York Times and CBS News, that some of them may have been removed from an ammunition dump after American troops passed by and failed to secure the area. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency had warned American officials before the war began that nearly 380 tons of high explosives were hidden at the stockpile called Al Qaqaa.

In Pensacola, Fla., on Tuesday afternoon, Vice President Dick Cheney said it was "not at all clear" that the explosives were still in the stockpile when American troops arrived, and he suggested that Mr. Kerry was insulting the accomplishments of American troops.

"John Kerry doesn't mention that, nor does he mention the 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that our troops have captured and are destroying," Mr. Cheney said. "If our troops had not gone into Iraq, as John Kerry apparently thinks they should not have, that is 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that would be in the hands of Saddam Hussein, who would still be sitting in his palace, instead of jail."

Republican officials have sought to discredit the initial reports and seized on an NBC News account, broadcast Monday night, that said when troops from the 101st Airborne arrived at the vast site on April 10, 2003, they found conventional weapons but none of the extremely powerful high explosives, HMX and RDX, which can be used to set off a nuclear weapon. In an e-mail message sent to reporters on Monday evening, Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said, "The weapons were not there when the military arrived, making John Kerry's latest ripped-from-the-headlines attack baseless and false."

But Tuesday evening, NBC again reported on the issue. This time it reported that it had not said that the explosives were gone before American troops arrived at Al Qaqaa. Instead, it reported that troops from the Third Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne searched bunkers at the site and had not found the powerful explosives. NBC reported that it was not clear whether American troops searched all of the bunkers.

"Last night on this broadcast we reported that the 101st Airborne never found the nearly 380 tons of HMX and RDX explosives," Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchor, said. "We did not conclude the explosives were missing or had vanished, nor did we say they missed the explosives. We simply reported that the 101st did not find them."

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"For its part, the Bush campaign immediately pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans arrived," Mr. Brokaw added. "That is possible, but that is not what we reported."

For the second day Mr. Bush did not speak about the issue, twice ignoring questions from reporters.

Mr. Kerry's efforts to use the disappearance of the explosives to question the president's competence as commander in chief, both on Iraq and on domestic security, signaled that he would take aim directly at Mr. Bush's chief rationale for re-election: that he is better prepared to lead a war against terrorists.

As he raced from Wisconsin to Nevada and on to New Mexico and Iowa, Mr. Kerry accused the president of diverting American forces and intelligence operatives to Iraq from the hunt in Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He said this had "allowed Osama to get away" and allowed Al Qaeda to spread to other countries.

As Mr. Bush spent his campaign appearances Tuesday in Wisconsin and Iowa on the economy, Mr. Kerry devoted half of his remarks to Iraq and the missing explosives.

He noted that RDX had been used to down Pan Am 103 and to attack the destroyer Cole in Yemen, and said that the explosives could be used to "demolish entire buildings" and "kill our troops."

"Faced with these devastating facts, these realities, these challenges that require presidential judgment, what did the president do?" Mr. Kerry said. "First he tried to hide the information until after the election. He stood in front of the American people, day after day, telling us how much progress we are making in Iraq and how much safer we are under his leadership, without ever mentioning the loss of these explosives.

"And when the media reported the loss, what did the White House have to say? First, they said they couldn't guard the weapons caches because they had other priorities."

"Then they argued that losing the explosives really wasn't that big a deal," Mr. Kerry added. "Finally, at the end of the day, the White House just boldly declared it didn't happen. Without a shred of evidence to dispute the International Atomic Energy Agency, they just flatly said the weapons were gone by the time our troops got there."